


On Trust

by piratesPencil



Category: DreamWorks Dragons (Cartoon), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hookfang's POV, Memories, Nightmares, just a dragon who loves his small human very much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24813586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratesPencil/pseuds/piratesPencil
Summary: Hookfang finds comfort in the fact that his rider is so small—comfort, and safety, and trust.
Relationships: Hookfang & Snotlout Jorgenson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 71





	On Trust

Hookfang’s rider had always been small. All of their riders had been, once upon a time. Just a bunch of small humans, barely grown. Nothing like the hulking, beastly adults that had hunted Hookfang and his kin for the first few decades of his life.

But as the other riders had grown, Hookfang’s rider had stayed small. He’d become a bit broader, a bit stronger, maybe gained an inch or two. But he never grew into the hulking size of the other adults in his tribe, never even reached the willowy height of the scrawnier humans.

Sometimes, when they were alone—which was when Hookfang liked his human best—Snotlout would complain to Hookfang that it wasn’t _fair_ that he hadn’t grown like the others, that he was the strongest out of all of them and he should have grown to be the _biggest_ , too.

Hookfang knew that his human was bothered by his size, and he didn’t like to see his rider in distress. (Well, a bit of playful distress was funny, but not _genuine_ distress.) But Hookfang didn’t agree with Snotlout’s distaste for his small stature—the fact that Snotlout was still so small was one of Hookfang’s favourite things about his rider.

After all, part of the reason why those little humans had gained the trust of Hookfang and his kin years before was _because_ they were so small—they were all still hatchlings, really. For Hookfang, at least, it was easier to forgive children for their crimes.

And Hookfang _had_ forgiven his rider and his rider’s friends for their past, but he certainly hadn’t forgotten. He would never forget the years he’d spent fearing hunters, trappers, Berk’s warriors… But more than that, he would never forget the months he spent in captivity on Berk, being used as nothing more than target practice for those little Berkian hatchlings.

Those months were the worst of his life. At times, he’d actually _longed_ to be back with the Queen, and that was saying something—the Queen was nearly as tyrannical as the humans. But he’d been _trapped_ , unable to fly free, and he’d known that something terrible was on the horizon.

Back then, he hadn’t understood human language as well as he did now, but he could tell that he’d been singled out. He’d known he was bigger and stronger than the other dragons who shared his captivity—the dragons who would one day become his packmates, his family—but it hadn’t brought him any comfort. He’d known the humans had something planned for him, something more than target practice, and it had terrified and enraged him in equal measure.

The human boy they called Hiccup was the first hatchling to show Hookfang and his kin any kindness. It had confused him, at the time. It had confused all of them.

Between training sessions, when Hookfang and the other dragons had been left locked up in the arena with barely enough fish to sustain them, they’d chattered among themselves, slowly growing closer, though always afraid—of the humans, of what might happen to them, of who they might lose first.

And the subject of their chatter had almost always been the mysterious, scrawny hatchling called Hiccup. Were his actions a trick, a set up for whatever horrible thing would happen to them next? Or did this human _understand_ them, in a way that none of them had ever experienced from a human before?

In a way, the possibility that a human could be gentle, could be kind, could be _dragon-like_ , terrified Hookfang more than anything. Hookfang was big, and he was strong, and he was also _smart_ , and he didn’t like that this human was something that he couldn’t understand.

On the day that Hiccup was sent into the arena to kill him, Hookfang had been so full of fear and fury that he would have killed the scrawny boy without regret if it had meant a chance at freedom, even though he’d come to tolerate the small Viking.

It horrified him now, to think back, to realize how close he’d come to killing not only Hiccup but the Night Fury he’d come to know as Toothless. Not just his packmates, his _alphas_.

Hookfang still had nightmares about that day in the ring, nights when he would wake up with his skin smouldering and his breath coming out in huffs, haunted by the memory of what had almost happened that day.

He wasn’t sure which nightmares were worse—the ones where he killed Hiccup and Toothless, or the ones where they killed him.

Worse than either of those, though, were the nightmares where it wasn’t Hiccup who walked into the ring that day. It was _his_ rider, his human, his Snotlout.

In those nightmares, Snotlout wasn’t small. He was huge, and he was mean. Sometimes, he looked like his father, a human that Hookfang had never liked, that he tolerated only out of respect for his rider.

Other times, he looked worse.

And in those nightmares, Hookfang was frozen. He couldn’t fight back, couldn’t flame up, couldn’t fly. How could he fight someone so strong, someone so mean, someone who had hunted him and caged him? The worst part was that, even in those nightmares, Hookfang cared about his rider. He loved his rider, loved him the way he’d only ever loved his clutchmates, before he’d lost them all to hunters or starvation.

In those nightmares, all Hookfang could do was bow his head, and let the human he loved take his life.

On those night, when Hookfang would wake up smouldering and shaken, only one thing could calm his racing heart.

The nights he spent curled up in Snotlout’s hut were better, but if he was spending the night in the stables, he would ease the door open and slip outside. The riders only locked the dragons in on rare occasions, when they felt like they needed to keep them safe from something. Hookfang hated those times, although he knew the humans meant well—besides, he knew that the wooden stables could never hold him if he really needed to get out.

Hookfang, still shaken, would make his way to his rider’s hut, following the moonlight that glinted off the silly metal S his rider loved so much.

He would push the door open and ease his way inside. His hammering heart wouldn’t slow until he could see the sleeping form of his rider, so small, so at peace.

He would curl up on the floor of the hut and rest his head on Snotlout’s bed, press his face right up against his sleeping rider, remind himself that the Snotlout of his nightmares, the Snotlout who was huge and hulking and cruel, wasn’t real.

Sometimes, Hookfang would wish that he was small, too, small enough to crawl right into the narrow bed beside his rider and bury himself under the covers and feel _safe._

Hookfang had spent so many years of his life in fear—fear of hunters, fear of the Queen, fear of starvation. With Snotlout, he felt safe. Sure, sometimes his rider was too loud, too brash, downright annoying. He liked to tease his rider, to test his limits, to watch him squirm just a little bit. And it had taken Hookfang time to truly trust his rider—in his opinion, his draconic packmates had been a little _too_ quick to trust their humans.

But now, Hookfang wouldn’t trade his little human for the world. He would protect his human, fight for him tooth and nail, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that his human would do the same for him. That he didn’t need to be big or tall to be strong, to be everything Hookfang needed him to be.

Sometimes, it felt unfair that Snotlout could talk to him, but he couldn’t talk to his human, not really, not in a language he could fully understand.

But he hoped that Snotlout knew how much he meant to him, how much he’d grown to _need_ this human.

When Hookfang would sneak into his human’s hut in the middle of the night, and curl up beside his bed, and rest his head beside him, sometimes his rider would wake up, would roll over and smile and rest one hand on Hookfang’s head.

And the amount of _trust_ in that one action would fill Hookfang’s heart to bursting. In an instant, he could have Snotlout’s hand, Snotlout’s _entire body_ , between his jaws—or, just as quickly, Snotlout could have a dagger right between Hookfang’s eyes. Under different circumstances, just a few years earlier, they both would have done it without hesitation.

The fact that they would never, that neither of them even had to wonder if they were safe with the other—that was a feeling of safety that Hookfang had never experienced before, not even when he was a little hatchling himself.

He hoped that Snotlout could feel it, too, that overwhelming trust. That love.


End file.
